Hi Everyone,This is my first post here after spending lots of time perusing material on the site. I will be graduating from The College of William and Mary at the end of the month. I have been interested in a finance based career for sometime and this interest was cemented this past semester when I took a course entitle Applied Financial Derivatives. In the course we worked through the first half of Paul Wilmott Introduces Quantitative Finance. Here is my problem I am looking for a way to get my feet wet in the quantitative field, and pay off a few college loans before undertaking any further coursework. Does anyone have any suggestions for me. I know this is a long shot. Is it even reasonable for me to be hoping for job in quantitative finance at this point? Any guidance would be greatly appreciated.Craig

I'm in a similar boat. I want to get started in this direction.What gives me hope is that companies who will want to hire quants will want to hire highly intelligent people who have some low and medium level knowledge of quantitative finance. Intelligence or knowledge of a field is garnered through a two fold method. You may be innately intelligent, but you will need to know a lot about modern portfolio theory and important issues facing quants day to day. If you arent born smart, and most of us arent, keep working at it. Hard work is what polishes raw genius, and enough of hard work can make up for the lack of it.If you work very, very hard, and become a quant guru, and get through an interview, I suppose you'd have as good a chance as any. From what I understand though, you'll need to do some graduate level course work, and plug your way through some calculus and probability text books. Here is a nice but by no means definitive list of books worth looking athttp://www.quantnet.org/forum/showthread.php?t=1336&page=2The real guru's can add more Regards,Prasenjit

Your best bet, in my mind, would be to apply at banks and hedgies and hope to get in. Perhaps prasenj used "quant" as a misnomer, but quants pretty consistently have PhD level backgrounds, so your best bet would likely be some flavor of quant analyst.

Without any real work experience, since you're fresh out of school, I doubt HHs would waste any time on you. Your best bet, in my mind, would be to apply (ideally through contacts as doing so through the websites will almost certainly be a waste of your time) at banks and hedgies and hope to get in. Perhaps prasenj used "quant" as a misnomer, but quants pretty consistently have PhD-level backgrounds, so your best bet would likely be some flavor of quant analyst.